Whoops! Turns out debt doesn’t ruin economies - Salon.com

Whoops! Turns out debt doesn’t ruin economies - Salon.com
"The reason we are just now getting critical second looks at Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings, when the paper in question came out in 2010, is that the economists just didn’t release their data. Here’s Dean Baker complaining about that fact in 2010. As he wrote: “Mr. Rogoff and Ms. Reinhart have declined to adhere to standard ethics within the economics profession and have refused to share the data on which they base their conclusion with other researchers.”
This is important — it should in fact be a Big Deal — because Reinhart and Rogoff have been the ultimate authorities in the appeals to authority from everyone advocating austerity in the U.S. and across the world for the last few years. Tim Fernholz excerpts Tom Coburn’s account of the address the two gave to 40 senators, and quotes officials and politicians from Europe and the U.S. and from both sides of the American party divide praising Reinhart and Rogoff’s study.
So, austerity’s canceled, right? Haha, no, sorry.
The problem is that debt moralists used the study to justify a political belief, and they will not shed that belief now that the study has been shown to be flawed. The idea that debt is just innately bad, and indicative of a sort of national deficiency of character, will persist. It’s not based on data, it’s based on facile analogies to kitchen table checkbook balancing and “common sense” about how it is always necessary to “live within your means.” We already have plenty of evidence that austerity doesn’t boost economies, and no one cares. No one will care about this."